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Has top-down management outlived its usefulness? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-29

“Rather than smarts, the wealthiest people on earth appear to be rather small-minded idiot savants who share a common disdain for the rest of us.”

Solni Kolhatkar

THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, 11/1/22

The world’s attention span moved beyond Tucker Carlson’s dismissal from FOX News. Then he found another job, which FOX believed was against his termination settlement, so he got back in the news. My discussion is about the nature of his sudden dismissal. After all, Carlson was not the only FOX celebrity to be suddenly dismissed. Theories abounded why Carlson was fired. He abused his staff. He was a sexual predator. He said bad things about Donald Trump. He said bad things about the organization he worked for. Still, his show got tremendous ratings, which made his employer huge sums of money, which is essentially why businesses hire people in the first place. So why was Carlson fired? Simply, because Rupert Murdoch, his boss, wanted to let him go. Under prevailing rules of business, the matter ends there. Right, wrong, fairness, and good sense are not issues—bosses need no reasons to fire employees. At issue here is wage slavery.

Evidence abounds that Carlson actually did commit many of the acts he was accused of—deeds that routinely get people dismissed throughout the business/industrial world. However, Carlson made enormous amounts of money for Murdoch. Sure—character is supposed to count more than profit, but we are in the “adult” world now. Just before Carlson’s firing, FOX News settled a lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars. By firing Carlson and his co-workers, Murdoch might have been looking to save enough money to pay off his legal debts. Reducing payrolls is a predictable means of cutting costs without having to lower prices or improve products, tactics which could reduce profits. Not only will Murdoch save a lot of money by firing those top-tier employees, but as a bonus, the surviving workers, fearing they could be next, should work harder and be more obedient.

Compared to most workers in similar situations, Carlson and his co-terminated co-workers are sitting pretty. With their severance settlements, and high salaries over the past years, they are more than quite comfortable for their lifetimes. Most workers who lose their jobs get only what they earned in their final pay period. In the capitalistic world, workers are expected to plan for such sudden changes in their financial status, though most workers live, if not paycheck-to-paycheck, close to the line. If they cannot find new jobs quickly, they are soon broke, their families impoverished. The State, in some cases, provides meager relief, but it rarely suffices and it does end, often before new jobs can be found.

If job losses occur in large enough numbers, the results can be disastrous for entire nations—events called recessions, which business owners and managers prepare for, usually by terminating workers. Excuses abound for the causes of each recession, but the root cause of all recessions is that worker productivity is so high, and worker wages so low, that eventually industry produces more goods than workers can buy. Corporate executives, having no reason to continue paying people to produce unsalable goods, are ready to cut their inventories and their hired help—choices that owners make. Working class people suffer greatly in these expected, accepted, “business cycles.”

Economists, corporate spokespersons and government officials give us so-called rational explanations for mass terminations, but they occur only because bosses decide to make mass terminations. Few tears are shed. But is it rational to sacrifice the well-being, even lives, of millions, only to keep profits high? Owners could pool their resources into public funds to help unneeded workers keep buying, until demand increases. We have systems that accomplish the same results, called “social safety nets,” but these are anathema to the titans who rule our economy and society. Plutocrats prefer mass terminations, and the mass misery that accompanies them. Throughout two centuries of industrialization, the process whereby production outpaces consumption has led to layoffs and recessions, without change. In those two centuries, the same class of people has ruled the world. Are they “rational” or just cruel? How sick must people be, to run the world that way? And who would let them?

The principle that business owners are absolute monarchs within their businesses is a matter of faith, rather than reason. I worked with people, average laborers like myself, who adamantly defended owners’ rights to dismiss any or all workers, for any reason or none, no matter the consequences. Total communities could be ruined because one sick, angry individual decides to fire everyone working for “his” company. Still, my co-workers felt the owners have unalienable rights to do just that. Incidentally, my workmates were preaching from a safe space, since we worked in civil service, which provides some worker protections; in addition, we were represented by a strong union. In such organizations, bosses can still fire employees who cannot or will not do their jobs, but they need to provide documented proof that fired workers were not performing up to standards. We had jobs to do, and we could do them without having to worry if someone somewhere up the chain of command might be in a bad mood that day. Supervisors, being human, could still, for whatever reasons, take their moods out on their employees. But it was done with the knowledge that those episodes were not going to result in someone’s immediate sentence to starvation. Is there any reason why all employees in all fields cannot have the same protections?

Efficiency is the main excuse for rigid management by fear that is America’s commercial foundation. The bosses need to make quick, sometimes unpleasant decisions. But the work must go on. We could make the same argument for chattel slavery. Nothing like fear of being whipped while being worked to death without getting paid, to increase productivity, efficiency, and company loyalty. Right? But chattel slavery is now illegal, as well as universally considered to be totally immoral—having been replaced by wage slavery, which “frees” individuals to go hungry, should they displease their “owners.” Fear remains the driver for the modern economy. And people who are no saner than we are, who arguably are considerably less stable than many of us, hold the fates of billions, individually and collectively, in their hands.

The world’s stability will not be on the line if bosses are denied the privilege of firing their employees based on whim. In the world economy, contracts are the foundation of doing business. Companies are expected to perform certain services and deliver certain products for one another, in the daily business-as-usual. It is only with individual employees that bosses have total authority while most workers have no rights. Companies do business with each other on the basis of mutual respect and legally agreed-upon requirements. They do business with their workers on the basis of fear. Capitalists by nature have no interest in changing the current system. People who need to sell their labor in order to survive must make the changes, which they can only do by joining together. I have no idea whether I deserve the disdain of those who are far richer than I am. People have rights to their sentiments and opinions. But I (and everybody else) deserve to be treated with respect by those who hire us to work for them. If the world’s workers should unite, what do they have to lose?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/29/2184070/-Has-top-down-management-outlived-its-usefulness

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